The purpose of the proposed research is to generate a descriptive and an explanatory account of deaf children's development of communication skills and to compare their performances with hearing children using spoken English. Two converging approaches to the study of communication skills are employed. One is experimental and relies on referential communication paradigms and psychometric techniques. The other is sociolinguistic and relies on longitudinal studies of young deaf children and on protocols elicited from single subjects and small groups by means of naturalistic observation and interviews. The research has theoretical significance in its potential for discovering the ways in which specific communication skills are integrated so as to generate different levels of communicative competence and for examining the development of communication skills in the broader context of social and cognitive development. Its practical significance lies with the insight that may be gained for educational and rehabilitative intervention with deaf children's language deficit and deaf adults' communication handicap.